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$xhtml = array(
	'<{title}>' => 'Not the path I walk',
	'takedown' => '2017-11-01',
	'<{body}>' => <<<END
<img src="/img/CC_BY-SA_4.0/y.st./weblog/2018/10/02.jpg" alt="Rebuilding part of a burnt house" class="framed-centred-image" width="649" height="480"/>
<section id="lost">
	<h2>Lost credit card</h2>
	<p>
		I added visiting my mother to my list of errands today, seeing as it was her birthday.
		I headed out early so I could give her as much time as I could, and ended up at Bi-Mart before they opened.
		I hadn&apos;t really eaten breakfast, as I was trying to hurry out the door, so I stopped at a nearby fast food joint to kill ten minutes or so while Bi-Mart was opening up.
		There, I found my credit card wasn&apos;t in my wallet.
		I told them to cancel my order, and they offered to cover my bill for me.
		I didn&apos;t feel right about that though, and I was cancelling my order because I needed to go find my credit card, not because I couldn&apos;t pay.
		I have two other credit cards in that wallet.
		They wouldn&apos;t take no for an answer, but I told them I couldn&apos;t wait for the food to be made, and hurried out.
	</p>
	<p>
		So, I hurried off both without breakfast and without checking the Bi-Mart Tuesday lucky number of the week.
		I was almost certain of where I left my card though: the grocery store.
		I bought groceries last night.
		When the card machine beeped at me, I was in the middle of leading my purchases into my backpack, so instead of stopping what I was doing and pulling out my wallet to put it away, I pulled it out of the machine just barely enough to get the machine to stop beeping, fully intending to actually take the card when I was done loading up.
		I got distracted talking to the checker though, and forgot the card.
		I dropped my mother&apos;s present off at her place, which was a couple of blocks closer than the grocery store, then zipped away to try to retrieve the card.
		The had it at the customer service desk, right where I assumed it&apos;d get moved to.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="visit">
	<h2>Visit</h2>
	<p>
		I tried to help my mother fix the loose gas line in her car.
		I don&apos;t think I really helped much though.
		My hands are just to big to fit in the tight spaces of the car&apos;s innards.
		I did point out some rather obvious properties of the screw-down fastener she was using though, which she didn&apos;t get at first, but understood after some explaining.
		She&apos;d ruined one of the fasteners due to the tights space in the engine area, the inability to see anything in there, and not knowing how the thing was oriented.
		She thought there was no way to know how the replacement would be oriented, as gravity kept pulling the heavy side down to where it couldn&apos;t be worked with, but the thing can&apos;t actually spin in every direction due to being wrapped around a tube.
		It basically just spins on a single, two-dimensional plane.
		The side with the screw, which she needed to know where was, would always remain on either the left or the right, depending on which way she put it in, once the entire heavy part was brought back to where she could work on it.
		She&apos;s far better than I am at figuring out what sorts of tools she needs, such as this screw-down fastener, but I&apos;m much better at visualising how objects move through space when unable to actually see them.
	</p>
	<p>
		We ended up going out for salad together.
		Well, sort of.
		I had a salad, anyway.
		She had a coupon sent to her by a buffet for her birthday, so we went there.
		She had pizza and other things, while I ate the available greens.
		I didn&apos;t complain, as the point was to spend time with her, but the salad wasn&apos;t really all that filling and the buffet doesn&apos;t let you go back for more.
		I piled the salad up pretty well, but there&apos;s only so much you can fit on a plate of a given size before it just tumbles off.
	</p>
	<p>
		My mother started talking about how I should sign up for the buffet&apos;s birthday coupon list.
		I agreed, under the premise that I could use a false birthday.
		She knows very well I don&apos;t do anything on my actual birthday.
		But then she had to go and talk about when the coupon would come, assuming I&apos;d for some reason give them my actual birthday and let them torment me every year.
		So I explained that I&apos;d probably tell them my birthday was January first.
		I didn&apos;t tell her this, but 1970-01-01, the UNIX Epoch, is my go-to false date of birth I use whenever someone that really doesn&apos;t need to know my birthday has me fill out some form that requires me to enter a birthday.
		She asked why, and I reminded her that I don&apos;t like being pestered on my birthday.
	</p>
	<p>
		She kept pushing, wanting to know why not.
		So I told her: of everything in this world, what I resent most is my own existence, and it&apos;s just not at all nice to rub it in my face every year.
		That&apos;s not <strong>*exactly*</strong> my reasoning per se, but it&apos;s the closest I can get to making her understand that I really and truly want the world to leave me alone about my birthday.
		It&apos;s true that I resent my own finite existence though.
		If I could live forever, that would bet eh best option, but short of that, I&apos;d rather not have been created in the first place.
		I believe death to be a fate worse than never having had life to begin with.
		She asked if there was really nothing in this world that was worth living for, so I explained that it didn&apos;t matter if there was or not.
		Life would necessarily come to an end, and every good thing I&apos;d ever had in life would be taken away.
		It doesn&apos;t matter how great life may or may not be, as I would lose it.
	</p>
	<p>
		We also discussed somewhere in there what to spend life doing.
		She brought up that my schooling and the tech world bring me pain.
		Why am I even going into this field.
		I explained that although making a difference isn&apos;t going to make a difference, seeing as even our world has a finite lifespan, some primal part of me wants to try to fix the world anyway.
		And I think with the skills I have, the tech industry is my most likely place to make improvements.
		She asked that if it didn&apos;t matter, why focus on that?
		Why not just focus on trying to do what would make me happy?
		So I explained that her argument was inconsistent.
		My happiness is as meaningless as the difference I want to make.
		She said my happiness would matter to me.
		So I explained that my own happiness isn&apos;t what matters to me; fixing this broken world is.
		That made her cry, which wasn&apos;t my intention.
		There was no reason to even discuss this train of thought, but she pushed it.
		There was no reason to discuss my birthday, seeing as it was hers today and not mine.
	</p>
	<p>
		I hate to have killed her world view of my future and taken away her hope for me.
		It had to happen though.
		She always seems to look at my choices from such a selfish perspective.
		She wants me to aim for my own happiness and screw everyone else.
		I&apos;m not her though.
		That&apos;s not the path I walk.
		She finds it dumb that I choose not to use painkillers, too, even when I had teeth pulled.
		When she says I might as well be pain-free, I tell her I need the pain as a reminder that life is pain, and I should never bring another human life into this world.
		Maybe now she&apos;ll understand that a bit better.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="drudgery">
	<h2>Drudgery</h2>
	<p>
		My discussion posts for the day:
	</p>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			It&apos;s not just individual doctors that put profits above patient health; it&apos;s the entire industry.
			I mean, just look at drug patents.
			Companies take out patents on their new drugs, creating a monopoly on said drugs, preventing other companies from competing.
			With no competitors, the companies mark up their drug prices so they can make a killing, and many patients can&apos;t afford them.
			Later, when the patents are about to expire, they change their drug slightly in a way that doesn&apos;t affect how the drug functions.
			They take out new patents on these &quot;new&quot; drugs, but because of the broad scope of a patent, the old version of the drug is covered by the new patent as well, so generic versions of the drug <strong>*still*</strong> can&apos;t be produced by other companies.
			The company holding the patents then continues to overcharge for their drugs, as there&apos;s still no competition in the market.
		</p>
		<p>
			Insurance companies are pretty bad too.
			I forget the percentage range, but they they demand huge discounts from health care providers.
			If a health care provider doesn&apos;t comply, the insurance company will move their patients elsewhere.
			As a result, they providers are strong-armed into providing the demanded discounts just to keep their patient count high enough to keep their doors open.
			But they can&apos;t afford these discounts.
			So what they have to do is mark up their prices to the point where after the discount is applied, they&apos;re making the amount of money they would have asked for if the discount hadn&apos;t been required.
			This means that for people without insurance, the price is jacked way up, and they can&apos;t afford it.
			Ever wonder why basic health care is so expensive?
			Well, this is a big part of it.
		</p>
		<p>
			And coming back to individual doctors, there are many corrupt ones.
			They take bribes and kickbacks from drug companies in exchange for prescribing drugs made by that company.
			In some cases, they prescribe drugs you don&apos;t actually need in order to make that extra money.
		</p>
		<p>
			The sad truth is that the health care industry doesn&apos;t exist to provide health care.
			It exists to make a profit.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			I know all too well the problem of self stigma.
			Growing up, I thought I was asexual.
			I&apos;d never felt sexual attraction, and the idea of sexual intercourse seemed disgusting to me.
			But about a year and a half ago, my sexuality blossomed and I turned out to be a queer.
			Though I&apos;m non-binary in gender, I&apos;m attracted to people of my own sex now.
			I&apos;ve thankfully never had anything against queers, and even had a queer friend in high school, so I didn&apos;t have to hate myself for what I am, but I still didn&apos;t want to be one.
			I fought for several months trying to remove that part of me.
			I wanted to go back to being asexual.
			Things were much simpler that way.
			But it wasn&apos;t meant to be.
			I ended up damaging my mind, and splitting my personality a bit.
			I grew to accept my newfound situation to an extent, and I healed, but then I tried fighting it again and split myself once more.
		</p>
		<p>
			Not accepting who you are can be hard on your mind.
			I eventually had to get over my stigma and accept what I am to get back to a healthy state.
			When health problems aren&apos;t caused by a stigma as mine were, you may need help recovering from your health condition, but getting past that stigma is the only way to find the strength to seek the help you need.
			Even the stigma itself can cause damage though, which compounds with the health issue you&apos;re already experiencing.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			I&apos;ve had insomnia in the past too, and it&apos;s not fun at all.
		</p>
		<p>
			When you ask about culture, it really depends on where you live and who you hang out with.
			Local cultures and subcultures vary widely.
			I&apos;d say around my own local area, seeing a psychiatrist comes with a heavier stigma than seeing a physician.
			If there&apos;s something wrong with your body, people don&apos;t judge you as much as if there&apos;s something wrong with your mind, even if the mental issue is only a temporary and easy-to-solve-with-help problem.
			People do judge each other and themselves based on what type of doctor&apos;s help is needed.
		</p>
	</blockquote>
</section>
END
);
